I saw a show about self defense for women in NY city. The instructor said to always carry a sucker. One of those tootsie pops or the like. If in trouble, hold the ball in your hand, turn the stick outward, between your middle and ring finger and punch at something soft and fleshy like stomach or face (eyes, mouth). It’s nice because it works everywhere. Even the TSA will let you board a plane with a sucker.

Same for me. In addition to deflock.me and haveibeenflocked.com, are there any community resource sites for finding others in the same city that would be willing to start pushing on the city to cancel their contract?

You’re not just voting for politicians, but judges, sheriffs, school board members & many others. Often, you’re choosing the lesser of 2 evils and rarely will you match policy-for-policy with your best candidate, but in what other way do you have to express your opinions?

I research all candidates on my locality’s ballot and bring notes on who I plan to vote for. I sometimes can vote absentee, which is even better.

As I’ve found in many elections, I’m the minority. That’s ok because I believe that when the polls are close, it can pull the candidates closer to my views as they try to appeal to the groups that may give them a few more votes.

How do you decide what’s for Terraform and what’s for Ansible?

I haven’t heard about the terrible longevity. They even top the consumer reports list for EVs. What sorts of longevity issues are there?

I had to scroll way too far down the pageto find this (i trynot to duplicateanother’s comments). At the core of some of thescummy advertisements is profiling, enhanced by privacy violations. Remove the abikity to track you around the internet and IRL and advertisements become less obtrusive.

The other side of the coin is that it costs so little to add adverts to a web page, so why not collect a little cash to help offset your hosting costs? Remove the profiling and Google & friends don’t have a leg to stand on, so then when you visit a cooking blog you see ads for kitchen utensils. No biggie. Looking for auto repair articles? Check out this awesome wrench! At least you now don’t go to show your mom some wedding venue you’re thinking about renting alongside an ad for ED meds from the dark market.

Similar to others, I do this but the reverse direction. I have a Pi with HDD at a friend’s house. On a timer, it wakes up at 3am, boots to a VPN and initiates an rsync (pull) with it’s twin Pi at my place. When the sync is done, it powers down or the timer cuts power at 9am.

Other than clock drift due to power outages, I’ve had no issues.

I have a directory that i can put scripts into and the remote Pi will execute anything in this directory after the sync and before the shutdown. Logs from the rsync or scripts are pushed back to a different directory on the local Pi.

A pretty good read. I’ve made many of these mistakes myself and learned from every one of them. We spend so much time hardening our home labs from the bad guys, I wonder if we should instead focus on hardening from ourselves.

Of course, the answer is both.

I thought Debian didn’t include firmware and other binaries by default. I remember having a separate firmware CD for installs on weird RAID controllers. Did that change?

My SO calls this diarrhea of the mouth. It’s quite the affliction.

Check your power source. Swap it as a test. I’ve spent too much time debugging SD card issues only to discover the power supply was going bad or underperforming.

I’ve been trying to learn K8s and more recently the Gateway API. The struggles are that most Helm charts don’t know Gateway (most are barely Ingressroute) and I’m trying to find a solution to one service affecting the other gateways.when a service cannot find a pod, the httproute fails and when one route fails, the ingress fails. It’s a weird cascading problem.

Right now, I’m considering adding a secondary service to each gateway that resolves to a static error page. I haven’t looked into it yet; it cane to me in the brief moment of clarity before I fell asleep last night.

Also, I may be doing everything wrong, but I am learning and learning is fun.

Point taken. It was probably a bad example. I was trying to find an example of something that would be an unpopular topic rare hat would ultimately benefit the community.

I saw somebody suggest that the voting buttons should be used to indicate whether the comment benefits the discussion or not.

I suppose the same would be true of the original post; does the post benefit the community.

For example, posting a blog of why Mitsubishi is the best car maker to a photography forum is a downvote, true or not. Posting that veganism isn’t a sustainable lifestyle to a vegan sub is an upvote, but you’d better be ready for some backlash.

Perhaps you can find inspiration from Daryl Davis, who convinced 200 Klansmen to give up their robes.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

I heard something on a radio show during Covid on how to talk to people who have “gone down the rabbit hole”. It was discussing MAGA as a cult. The guest on the show was a woman who was raised in a cult in the 70’s and she “got out” and spent her time talking with others in the cult to help them to break free. I can’t find a reference to the show, but I think it was Carrie Miller hosting.

My takeaway was that you can’t come at people and tell them that everything they know is wrong and you will show them the way. They’ll fight you. You need to deprogram them similarly to how they were programmed into the cult. Small bits, here and there to slowly guide them to questioning their beliefs. Once that happens, show them how to research and seek out information and let them know that they will be safe.

If someone found a link to the podcast/radio show, I’d be super happy.

I think what we’re dealing with, in part, is a collective action problem. There’s a lot of people who want to do something but either don’t know what to do or don’t agree on what to do. It’s one way that a minority population can stay in power.

What an individual can do is miniscule compared to a crowd. Also, some people are willing to break laws to make change and others are not.

I landed on Tandoor. I had a bunch of recipes on one of those web sites and they switched to a subscription model and locked me out of my recipes. I don’t remember why I chose Tandoor over Mealie, but having full ownership over my recipes is freeing.

I do on all my devices that can as a matter of practice, not for any real threat. I’m interested to learn about how to set it up and use it on a daily basis including how to do system recoveries. I guess it’s largely academic.

Once I switched to linux as my daily driver, I didn’t have a need to do piracy anymore since all the software I need is FOSS.

I scrolled way too far to find exercise. Not that you’re going to fall asleep within 5 minutes of returning from a run, but it really does work. Among other things, aerobic exercise will help with stress, sleep, some back and joint problems, helps you to eat less and burn more calories.

On another note, I heard something in a podcast or radio show that said that a special type of breathing exercise is as good as exercise for many of these things and will fool your body. Obviously, it won’t build muscle, but it may help with sleep and stress.